Kickstarter Pledges Pass The $1Bn Milestone

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for creative projects, hit a major milestone today, when it officially racked up $1 billion in pledges.

According to the company’s statistics page, its $1 billion in total funds represents $859 million backing successful projects — with the $1 billion total referring to all projects, including those that are still in progress, or else which failed to reach their funding goal.

To date, there have been 57,121 successful Kickstarter projects — earning the company just under $43 million in the 5% cut that it takes of all successful projects.

Of course, not all Kickstarter projects have happy endings — with 74,042 unsuccessful projects on the platform. The stats also don’t reveal how many fully funded projects actually get made. A study published this year by Evil as a Hobby put the delivery of funded games from 2009-2012 at only 37&, while a similar study from 2012 suggested that 75% of projects in the tech and design categories failed to reach completion.

The majority of the $1 billion pledges come from U.S. backers, with $663,316,496 raised in total — while Kickstarter projects have had contributions from 224 countries. 1,689,979 people have backed more than one project, and 15,932 people have backed in excess of 50.

While films account for the majority of launched projects (33,471), it is games that have seen the biggest success in terms of money pledged: picking up a total of $215.7 million in total funding.

Although it’s still an imperfect means of getting projects off the ground (as can be seen from the number of uncompleted projects), Kickstarter has still been a great tool for would-be developers and accessory makers across both the Android and iOS platforms.